art history

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  8/6/2020
  

  The Secret History of America’s Worthless Confederate Monuments

  They’re cheap, mass produced, and celebrate the Jim Crow South. So why do conservatives persist in calling them art?

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• SOURCE: Foreign Policy
  7/28/2020
  

  Is It Time to Repatriate Africa’s Looted Art?

  Museums now face a moral reckoning over artifacts stolen by people who took colonial violence and racial superiority as a given. It is time to start having honest conversations about righting those wrongs.

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• 7/26/2020
  

  Lincoln, Cass, and Daniel Chester French: Homely Politicians Divided by Politics, United through Art

  by Harold Holzer

  In the age before the glare of television and instantaneous photography were relentlessly aimed at our leaders, politicians could succeed even if they looked like Lewis Cass. Or Abraham Lincoln.

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• SOURCE: University of South Carolina
  7/22/2020
  

  The Long History of How Jesus Came to Resemble a White European

  No one knows exactly what Jesus looked like, and there are no known images of him from his lifetime. Art history professor Anna Smartwood House writes about the complicated history of the images of Christ and how historically they have served many purposes.

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• SOURCE: ABC News
  7/18/2020
  

  Historians Debate America's History of Racism and Confederate Monuments

  Experts interviewed by ABC News say erasing the past isn't the answer to calls for justice, police reform and an end to structural racism.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  6/29/2020
  

  Disputed African Artifacts Sell at Auction

  Chika Okeke-Agulu’s voice is one of many calling for the repatriation of African artworks in European and American collections that are thought to have been acquired through colonial exploitation or illegal looting.

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• SOURCE: Vox
  6/22/2020
  

  Artists Helped Lift America out of the Great Depression. Could that Happen Again?

  Art historian Jody Patterson, an expert on public art in the 1930s, discusses the legacy of the New Deal's support for the arts and efforts to establish art as a public good. 

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• SOURCE: The New York Times
  6/10/2020
  

  Modigliani Expert Says a Nonprofit Is Holding His Research ‘Hostage’

  Marc Restellini, an art historian, is fighting the Wildenstein Plattner Institute over the ownership of a research archive he spent decades compiling.

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• SOURCE: UNC Press Blog
  6/9/2020
  

  Rumors of War in Richmond

  by Thomas J. Brown

  Kehinde Wiley's statue Rumors of War certainly draws meaning from its location, but it is also the capstone of a series on which the artist has been engaged since an early stage of his meteoric career, long before Confederate monuments stirred wide controversy.

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• SOURCE: NPR
  5/31/2020
  

  Christo, Famous For His Monumental Works Of Art, Dies At 84

  Christo's works played off of their environment in cities around the world.

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  5/11/2020
  

  “Don’t Regret. Remember”: Frictions of History and Gender in Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”

  by Paris A. Spies-Gans

  Historian Paris A. Spies-Gans discusses the historical references and significance of the critically acclaimed French film.

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• SOURCE: ArtNews
  5/10/2020
  

  Art Historians are Obsessed with Recovering Lost Names. But are they Asking the Wrong Questions?

  In her exhibition “The Unknown Artist," curator Lucy Cotter probes the very values of attribution.

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• SOURCE: The Art Newspaper
  5/4/2020
  

  Cache Of Russian Avant-Garde Works Surfaces In Regional Museum's Basement

  A leading Russian avant-garde expert says he has identified dozens of works by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova languishing in an obscure history museum in the Kirov region.

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• SOURCE: NY Daily News
  4/28/2020
  

  ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ Gets Thorough Inspection but Mystery Still Surrounds Subject

  While art historians have been able to employ state-of-the-art imaging techniques to establish a more precise analysis of the artwork — often referred to as the "Dutch ‘Mona Lisa’” — its subject remains a mystery.

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• SOURCE: WBUR
  4/9/2020
  

  What The Depression-Era Works Progress Administration Can Teach Us About The Arts During A Crisis

  During the Great Depression, art became a part of people's everyday lives, notes art historian Jody Patterson.

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• SOURCE: Jewish Telegraphic Agency
  4/28/2020
  

  Alan Shestack, Influential Museum Director And Art History Scholar, Dies At 81

  Shestack's decades-long career included top leadership roles at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Yale University Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Art.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/30/2020
  

  This is how Bad Things are for Museums: They Now Have a Green Light to Sell Off Their Art

  The Association of Art Museum Directors has relaxed its guidelines against selling works of art for operating funds. Now, the notion of selling off a Claude Monet or two to plug a budgetary hole—or to fend off a total financial meltdown—is suddenly something to contemplate.

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• SOURCE: Observer
  4/5/2020
  

  An Art History Professor’s Tips for Taking Your Kids on a World Tour—From Home

  Many of the world's greatest landmarks and artworks are just a click away.

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• SOURCE: Art News
  4/2/2020
  

  David C. Driskell, Tireless Advocate for Black Art History, Is Dead at 88

  Driskell's work, including the famous exhibition "Two Centuries of Black American Art," illustrated the importance of black artists in American art history.

• 
• SOURCE: Art News
  3/25/2020
  

  5 Essential Works by Maurice Berger, Late Art Historian Who Made Race a Central Concern

  A tireless advocate for a more diverse museum world, Berger, who died at 63 of coronavirus-related causes on Monday 3/23, is considered one of the best thinkers on race, in particular as it relates to photography.